Red wine keeps elderly steady on their feet, according to new research

Want the agile balance of an Olympic gymnast? Just sit back, relax and indulge in a few glasses of wine – 700 of them, to be exact.

Purely medicinal: wine can help keep people nimble – but only in vast quantities.

Anti-oxidant resveratrol, which is found in red wine, could make people more nimble by protecting nerves from damage, tests show.

The only snag is, a 68kg (10st) person would need 700 small glasses a day to feel the effects.

After all that, they’d probably be dead, and certainly not rotating on the pommel horse like Olympic silver medallist Louis Smith.

However, the possibility of creating compounds which mimic the effects of resveratrol, and are more easily absorbed by the body, are now being investigated by scientists.

The breakthrough has the potential to prevent life-threatening falls in elderly people, said Dr Jane Cavenaugh, who led the research at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, US.

‘Our study suggests that a natural compound like resveratrol, which can be obtained either through dietary supplementation or diet itself, could actually decrease some of the motor deficiencies that are seen in our ageing population,’ she said.

‘That would increase an ageing person’s quality of life and decrease their risk of hospitalisation due to slips and falls.’

Tests on ageing rodents revealed resveratrol’s restorative powers.

Older mice struggled to navigate their way across a narrow beam but, after four weeks of taking it, were able to manage it just as well as younger mice.

The molecule is thought to work by blocking destructive free radicals and encouraging the survival of cells.